Do you have a male brain or a female brain? The answer, according to science, is no.

If
you didn’t expect this to be a yes-or-no question, you’re not alone.
Male brains do seem to be built differently than female brains.
An analysis of more than 100 studies found that the volume of a man’s
brain is 8% to 13% greater than the volume of a woman’s brain, on
average. Some of the most noticeable differences were in areas of the
brain that control language, memory, emotion and behavior, according to a 2014 report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.To
find out whether these structural differences translated into cognitive
differences, scientists examined detailed brain scans of more than
1,400 men and women. No matter which group of people they looked at,
what type of scan was used or which part of the brain was examined, the
researchers consistently failed to find patterns that set men and women
apart.

“Although there are sex/gender differences in brain
structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and
the other typical of females,” the team wrote in a study
published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. “Each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may
be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common
in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both
females and males.”

To figure this out, the team – led by psychobiologist Daphna Joel
of Tel Aviv University in Israel – went hunting for examples of brain
“elements” that were either clearly male or clearly female. In other
words, they looked for examples of measurements that appeared to cluster
one way for men and another way for women, without much overlap in the
middle. Then, after identifying these elements, the researchers looked
to see whether women tended to have the “female” versions and men tended
to have the “male” versions.

They started with a set of
MRIs that measured the volume of gray matter in the brains of 112 men
and 169 women ages 18 to 79. On these scans, they examined 116 separate
regions and zeroed in on the 10 that showed the greatest difference
between men and women. In each case, the 281 scans were divided into
three categories – one-third considered “most male,” one-third
considered “most female” and one-third in the middle.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Some 20 years ago Todd Gitlin wrote The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. He was roundly booed by everyone with an investment in identity politics.

I
remember that period as it was when I first got on-line. I wasn't much
vested in the politics of identity and was constantly catching a bunch
of crap for being politically incorrect.

Over the last 20 years I
have come to view identity politics as one of the most universally
oppressive piles of bullshit to ever come down the pike.

You see
once there was something called the common good, things most people
could agree were good for the majority of people in this country and for
the country in general. There were enough things we could agree on.

Not everything turned into a fight complete with name calling.

Maybe
we used to feel we actually had some control over our lives, some real
say in how things were run. Maybe living in the real world was less
overwhelming than being flooded 24/7 with pleadings for support
accompanied by an inability to do anything about much of anything.

The message coming out of recent student protests on college campuses, from Princeton and Yale to the University of Missouri,
couldn’t be clearer: Students are rightly pained by the racist and
sexual abuse still shockingly common into the 21st century, and for good
reason they are indignant that institutions they trust — or wish to
trust — fail to stop the culprits, or even to acknowledge publicly the
harm they do.

But
rumbling under the surface of some recent protests is something besides
indignation: an assumption of grave vulnerability. The victims too
often present themselves as weak, in need of protection. Administrators
are held, like helicopter parents, wholly responsible. To a veteran of
movements of the ’60s like myself, this is strikingly strange.

Surely there are reasons to feel vulnerable to abuses of power. There is a rape culture. Black people are killed by the police in grotesque proportions. Hatred of immigrants has reached a high pitch of hysteria and looms large in the thinking of one of our major political parties.

It
is also true that many administrators are caught flat-footed; just
consider how long it took the University of Missouri to acknowledge
longstanding concerns by minority students about campus racism.

And
yet, when that recognition came and the president and chancellor
resigned, instead of celebrating an extraordinary victory — with
football players as their crucial allies — demonstrators blocked
photographers from taking pictures of their assembly. They apparently
believed that public assemblies ought to be “safe spaces,” meaning, safe
from photography, which might have been thought to be useful for
bringing the news to a larger public. Their starting assumption was that
the press had it in for them.

At Yale, meanwhile, administrators cautioned students about how to dress properly for Halloween,
and when another administrator publicly questioned whether this was an
issue the administration needed to take a position on, protesters
demanded her resignation.

We
can have it all: that is the promise of our age. We can own every
gadget we are capable of imagining – and quite a few that we are not. We
can live like monarchs without compromising the Earth’s capacity to
sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as
economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources.
In other words, they decouple.

There are two kinds of decoupling:
relative and absolute. Relative decoupling means using less stuff with
every unit of economic growth; absolute decoupling means a total
reduction in the use of resources, even though the economy continues to
grow. Almost all economists believe that decoupling – relative or
absolute – is an inexorable feature of economic growth.

On this notion rests the concept of sustainable development. It sits at the heart of the climate talks in Paris next month and of every other summit on environmental issues. But it appears to be unfounded.A paper published earlier this year
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes that even
the relative decoupling we claim to have achieved is an artefact of
false accounting. It points out that governments and economists have
measured our impacts in a way that seems irrational.

Here’s how
the false accounting works. It takes the raw materials we extract in our
own countries, adds them to our imports of stuff from other countries,
then subtracts our exports, to end up with something called “domestic
material consumption”. But by measuring only the products shifted from
one nation to another, rather than the raw materials needed to create
those products, it greatly underestimates the total use of resources by
the rich nations.

For instance, if ores are mined and processed at
home, these raw materials, as well as the machinery and infrastructure
used to make finished metal, are included in the domestic material
consumption accounts. But if we buy a metal product from abroad, only
the weight of the metal is counted. So as mining and manufacturing shift
from countries such as the UK and the US to countries like China and
India, the rich nations appear to be using fewer resources. A more
rational measure, called the material footprint, includes all the raw
materials an economy uses, wherever they happen to be extracted. When
these are taken into account, the apparent improvements in efficiency
disappear.

Monday, November 23, 2015

I for one am fed up with this cultural appropriation bullshit. Call the stretching exercises something else. Like Stretching Exercises based on Yoga.

I guess all the TaeKwondo, Karate and Kung-fu schools are going to have to close too.No
more studying languages other than your own or reading books, watching
movies outside your own culture. Better yet outside your own particular
identity group classification.Absolute
conformity to your designated identity community is mandatory otherwise
you could be labeled as having a psychiatric disorder called ODD
(Opposition Defiant Disorder).Wait I saw
movies from this dystopian nightmare. The series is called Divergent
and is based on a young adult series by the same name.Fuck
me. Being anti-authority/questioning authority/not being a good
sheeple makes one mentally ill in the Brave New World Order. Resisting
the 24/7 programming is being ... Well for want of a better term
Divergent.I should have known I was in
deep shit some 20 years ago when I faced ostracism for resisting the
ideology of the Transgender Borg CollectiveGrowing
up in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in a place where I was immersed
in the history of the American Revolution I considered my rights and
freedom to decide things for myself to be innate, as natural as a breath
of mountain air. I saw myself as an individual endowed with with basic
rights including the ability think for myself.

Telling people
they can't study things and learn for themselves about the world around
them is the worst sort of totalitarianism. It imposes ignorance and
places that ignorance on a pedestal of correct thinking.

I don't
give a shit if it is the right wing denying the importance to others of
their particular holidays that come at the end of the year or denying
sex education or denying climate change. Fuck those who claim sacred
status for yoga and other exercise techniques. Fuck those who demand
the world conform to their particular ideology. Fuck those who demand the world conform to their particular ideology. I
don't give a shit if it is so called progressives demanding I believe
their bullshit and accommodate their ultra sensitivities.You
can believe what ever the fuck you want. But I will go to war to
defend my right to believe something different if my learning and life
experiences have taught me something different.From The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/23/university-yoga-class-canceled-because-of-oppression-cultural-genocide/By Justin Wm. MoyerNovember 23, 2015In studios across the nation, as many as 20 million Americans practice yoga every day. Few worry that their downward dogs or warrior poses disrespect other cultures.

But
yoga comes from India, once a British colony. And now, at one Canadian
university, a yoga class designed to include disabled students has been
canceled after concerns the practice was taken from a culture
that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to
colonialism and western supremacy,” according to the group that once
sponsored it.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post,
Jennifer Scharf, who taught the class for up to 60 people at the
University of Ottawa, said she was unhappy about the decision, but
accepted it.

“This particular class was intro to beginners’ yoga
because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want
anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than
the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”

“I
have unfortunate news,” the e-mail from a student representative of the
center read. “Apparently our centre has chosen not to do yoga for
programming this year. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns
in regards to this and I am welcome to explain. Thank you so much for
volunteering to do yoga over the past couple years. It has truly been
wonderful and I hope to stay in touch in the future.” (Scharf provided
the e-mail exchange to The Post, but removed the name of the
representative so the person could not be identified, saying: “I don’t
want to get anyone in trouble.” A message sent to the representative’s
e-mail address was not immediately returned.)

“That’s
disappointing news for sure, is there someone I can speak to about
this?” she wrote. “Do you know why the decision was made? I don’t mind
doing it for free so if money is a concern, that’s no problem.”

Money was not a concern, however. Culture was.

“I
think that our centre agreed … that while yoga is a really great idea,
accessible and great for students, that there are cultural issues of
implication involved in the practice,” the response read. “I have heard
from a couple students and volunteers that feel uncomfortable with how
we are doing yoga while we claim to be inclusive at the same time.”

Explaining that yoga has a fraught history, the representative continued.

“Yoga
has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being
practiced and what practices from what cultures (which are often sacred
spiritual practices) they are being taken from,” the e-mail read. “Many
of these cultures are cultures that have experienced oppression,
cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western
supremacy, and we need to be mindful of this and how we express
ourselves and while practicing yoga.”

At
an event earlier this year, I met two women who, as it turned out, were
not only business partners but also life partners. They left their
marriages and grown children in their 50s and have been together ever
since. My curiosity piqued, I'm afraid I monopolized their time with my
many questions. As someone who writes about midlife reinventions on my
site, Next Act for Women,
I am always on the lookout for women who have made major life changes,
whether personal or professional, later in life. This certainly
qualified.

As luck would have it, soon after, I received an unsolicited request from Lisa Ekus, who fell in love with another woman at 51 and wanted to share her story.
It was kismet. After hearing more about Lisa's background, and talking
to my sister, Kat, who also came out late, I felt there was a lot we
"straight" people needed to learn. Starting with my most glaring
misconception... 1. I DIDN'T "BECOME" GAY
Most of the women I interviewed were adamant that they did not suddenly
turn from straight to gay, but rather only awakened later in life to
their attraction to women. They feel this attraction has always been
there but had been previously inaccessible, for reasons individual to
each situation.

Lisa Dordal,
who came out after being married to a man for five years, explains, "I
finally embraced the fact that I was a lesbian when I came out of the
closet at age 30. I believe strongly that I was knit in the womb as a
lesbian. In retrospect, the clues had been there all along. In high
school and college, I wrote poems about girls and women I had crushes on
and can also remember falling in love with my best friend at 14--as
much as one can 'fall in love' at that age."

Candace Talmadge
agrees: "It's a question of acknowledging that which is already within
you and deciding to act on it instead of ignoring or burying it in the
closet. I tried to act straight and dated men without any success. I
could have continued on that unhappy road but I found a person who loves
and respects me and has been my best friend since 1986, and my spouse
since last year. She just happens to be female instead of male."

Dr. Lauren Costine, Psychologist, LGBTQ Activist, and author of Lesbian Love Addiction: Understanding the Urge to Merge and How to Heal When Things Go Wrong,
shares her journey: "Once I had worked on my internalized LGBTQ
phobias, I finally felt good enough about myself to be my authentic
self. I stopped worrying about what anyone thought about my identity and
who I loved and had sex with--especially my mother, who made it very
clear she did not want me to be a lesbian. It was very hard on me for a
long time because I did not want to disappoint her and I know her
inability to love this part of me affected my ability to come out
earlier in life. Unfortunately, she never accepted my lesbian identity
but I finally moved past needing her approval and started living my
life. And it's amazing! I love my life. I love being different and don't
want to be like everyone else. Life was way harder when I was trying to
be straight. Being an LGBTQ activist--trying to make the world a better
place for LGBTQ folks--takes away any discomfort I may have being a
sexual minority."

The alarming trend, overlooked until
now, has hit less-educated 45- to 54-year-olds the hardest, with no
other groups in the US as affected and no similar declines seen in other
rich countries.Though not fully understood, the increased
deaths are largely thought to be a result of more suicides and the
misuse of drugs and alcohol, driven by easier access to powerful
prescription painkillers, cheaper high quality heroin and greater
financial stresses.The turnaround reverses decades of falling
mortality rates achieved through better medical care and lifestyle
choices that continue to improve public health in other groups in the US
and in other nations around the world.“This was absolutely a
surprise to us. It knocked us off our chairs,” said Anne Case, an
economics professor at Princeton University who worked on the study.
Since discovering the trend, Case and her colleague Angus Deaton, also
an economics professor at Princeton, have shared the findings with
healthcare professionals. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t missing
something,” Case said. “Everyone’s been stunned.”The findings
emerged from a review of national surveys in the US and six other rich
industrialised countries, namely the UK, Australia, France, Germany,
Sweden and Canada.They showed that from 1978 to 1998, the
mortality rate for US whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2% a year, a figure
very much in line with the celebrated improvements in health seen in the
other countries.

But after 1998, the death rates of US whites
began to buck the trend. While other countries saw their mortality rates
continue to fall, they began to rise among middle-aged white
non-Hispanic Americans by 0.5% a year. The effect was not confined to
the 45- to 54-year-olds. In the 35- to 44-year-old bracket, the
mortality rate stopped falling in 2000. For 55- to 59-year-olds, the
fall slowed to 0.5% a year.

A
couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on
America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat
impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the
1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance
hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political
enemies look ever more at odds with reality.

Even more striking
are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans
are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly.
Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the
chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this
kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging
life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But
it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.Yet
the Deaton-Case findings fit into a well-established pattern. There
have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for
less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising
suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. And while popular
culture may focus more on meth than on prescription painkillers or good
old alcohol, it’s not really news that there’s a drug problem in the
heartland.

But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?

If
you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of
liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture
of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined
traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with
the evidence.

For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely
American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state
and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any
other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do,
and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet
Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.

You
see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States.
Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California,
where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest.
Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated
in the Bible Belt.What about a materialist explanation? Is
rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing
out of the middle class?

Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions
that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My children—who
are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in the
previous 3 million years,
and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate,
and in many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up
in. How do we relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?

Across different populations, psychological researchers have documented a long list of mental health consequences
of climate change: trauma, shock, stress, anxiety, depression,
complicated grief, strains on social relationships, substance abuse,
sense of hopelessness, fatalism, resignation, loss of autonomy and sense
of control, as well as a loss of personal and occupational identity.

This
more-than-personal sadness is what I call the “Great Grief”—a feeling
that rises in us as if from the Earth itself. Perhaps bears and
dolphins, clear-cut forests, fouled rivers, and the acidifying,
plastic-laden oceans bear grief inside them, too, just as we do. Every
piece of climate news increasingly comes with a sense of dread: is it
too late to turn around? The notion that our individual grief and
emotional loss can actually be a reaction to the decline of our air,
water, and ecology rarely appears in conversation or the media. It may
crop up as fears about what kind of world our sons or daughters will
face. But where do we bring it? Some bring it privately to a therapist.
It is as if this topic is not supposed to be publicly discussed.

This
Great Grief recently re-surfaced for me upon reading news about the
corals on the brink of death due to warming oceans as well as
overfishing of Patagonian toothfish in plastic laden oceans. Is this a
surging wave of grief arriving from the deep seas, from the ruthlessness
and sadness of the ongoing destruction? Or is it just a personal whim?
As a psychologist I’ve learned not to scoff at such reactions, or
movements in the soul, but to honor them.

A growing body of
research has brought evidence from focus groups and interviews with
people affected by droughts, floods, and coastal erosion. When elicited,
participants express deep distress over losses that climate disruptions
are bringing. It is also aggravated by what they perceive as inadequate
and fragmented local, national and global responses. In a study by
researcher Susanne Moser on coastal communities, one typical
participant reports: “And it really sets in, the reality of what we're
trying to hold back here. And it does seem almost futile, with all the
government agencies that get in the way, the sheer cost of doing
something like that – it seems hopeless. And that's kind of depressing,
because I love this area.” In another study by sociologist Kari
Norgaard, one participant living by a river exclaims: “It’s like, you
want to be a proud person and if you draw your identity from the river
and when the river is degraded, that reflects on you.” Another informant
experiencing extended drought explained to professor Glenn Albrecht’s
team that even if “you’ve got a pool there – but you don’t really want
to go outside, it’s really yucky outside, you don’t want to go out.”

SPRING
HILL, Tenn.—The hulking General Motors factory in this town south of
Nashville undermines the complaints by politicians left and right that
America doesn’t make things anymore.

A year ago, GM announced
it was moving production of its best-selling vehicle, the Cadillac SRX,
from Mexico to this plant in Tennessee. Today 3,000 people work on this
6.9 million square-foot campus, and more are being hired.

GM
is one of the hundreds of companies, big and small, that have moved
manufacturing back to the United States from overseas. Outsourcing
decimated American manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, erasing nearly
six million jobs between 1989 and 2009.

But the number
of manufacturing jobs has started to slowly grow again, and about
700,000 jobs have been added since 2010. “Onshoring,” as it’s called, is
at this stage delivering just a trickle of new jobs, but states such as
Tennessee are offering companies generous incentives to try and speed up the process, luring some big-name companies. Whirlpool in 2013 said it was moving production of commercial washing machines from Mexico to the U.S. The company that makes Otis elevators announced in 2012 that it would move production from Mexico to South Carolina. Caterpillar moved some heavy-equipment manufacturing back to the U.S.

But
these are not your father’s manufacturing jobs. Many of the companies
are locating their new plants in right-to-work states where it’s less
likely their workers will join a union, and the prevailing wages are far
lower.

In fact, nationally, the average wages of
production and non-supervisory employees in manufacturing are lower
than they were in 1985, when adjusted for inflation. In September, those
employees made an average $8.63 an hour, in 1982 to 1984 dollars, while
they made an average of $8.80 an hour in 1985, according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics.

Friday, November 6, 2015

Rokhshana was 19-years-old when a gang of men in Afghanistan stoned her to death
this week. The men who stoned her were enforcing Islamic law, otherwise
known as Sharia. According to the governor of the province, Ghor, she
lived in a Taliban-controlled village. Rokhshana was forced to marry
someone she did not want and she fled with another man, hence the
accusations of adultery that led to her sentencing and brutal execution.

Sharia
codifies Islam's many rules and governs everything from how to worship
daily to personal behavior, economic and legal transactions and the
governance of a nation. However, it is most commonly used as a tool to
rob women of their most basic rights, including sexual autonomy.Before Rokhshana's tragic death, the world's attention was caught for a while by the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani,
who was sentenced to death for adultery in Iran, a country governed by
Sharia law. Sakineh was ultimately not executed after an international
outcry in her defense.

Before that, the world knew of the plight
of the girl from Qatif, in Saudi Arabia, who was gang-raped by seven men
and sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison for being alone
with a man who was not her relative (see this from Katie Couric's Notebook when she was at CBS).

The
girl from Qatif was ultimately pardoned by the late King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia under pressure from President Bush. Unfortunately, the
pardoning did not mean that a precedent was set to quash the law in such
cases; it was nothing more than a gesture of politeness to the US.

Sometimes
a publicity campaign here in the West followed by strong diplomatic
action can work to save the life of a victim. Thanks to pressure from
Western governments, Meriam Ibrahim, the Christian woman who was
sentenced to death by the government of Sudan for apostasy and adultery,
was able to get out of Sudan last year.

The
problem is that so few cases make it to the headlines of the Western or
even local media. What I find to be a double tragedy is that when the
life of a woman is lost or threatened, we in the West condemn the act of
cruelty but fail to take a stand against the principle upon which the
punishment rests. It is like denouncing the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960
while saying nothing about the South African government's doctrine of
racial apartheid.

The only way to stop these ghastly punishments
against women is to campaign forcefully against the principle of Sharia
-- to stop the Islamist narrative that says Islamic law protects the
modesty, honor and well-being of the family.

Shutting up Germaine Greer, shutting up Israeli academics, where does it all stop. This way lies the path to tyranny.From The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/04/israeli-academic-shouted-down-in-lecture-at-university-of-minnesota/By Dale CarpenterNovember 4, 2015On
Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen
protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and
faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal,
a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and
philosophy at Hebrew University. He was invited to deliver the Dewey
Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, which is organized annually by the law
school. That the freedom to present a lecture is threatened in this way
at a public university is appalling, calling not only for punishment of
violations but for a clear statement by university officials defending
the free exchange of ideas.

The lecture, which I attended, was
delayed half an hour as one by one the protesters stood up to shout
denunciations of Israel and were escorted from the hall by university
police. One young woman came screaming back into the lecture after
having been ejected. Outside the hall, the protesters chanted so loudly
that it was difficult to hear Halbertal, much less to concentrate on
what he was saying, until 45 minutes after the lecture was to have
begun.

The protests were apparently organized by a group calling itself the “Anti-War Committee,” which bragged on its Twitter feed
about having disrupted the lecture and complained that the protesters’
“free speech” rights were violated when a few were arrested. It appears
that no law students were involved, but many of the demonstrators were
college-aged and the protest was endorsed by a group called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a university group. According to its Facebook page, SJP “promotes justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”The
lecture was entitled, “Protecting Civilians: Moral Challenges of
Asymmetric Warfare.” The talk did not directly address the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Halbertal drew in part on his
experience helping to draft the Israeli army’s code of ethics. When he
was finally able to speak, Halbertal argued that in fighting “asymmetric
wars” (typically, wars between professional militaries and insurgencies
or resistance movements) professional combatants should err on the side
of protecting noncombatants from casualties, even when they thereby
increase risks to themselves or to their cause.

It was a careful
and nuanced presentation, one that was far more dovish and human-rights
oriented than caricatures of Halbertal as a “war crimes apologist” by
protesters suggested. But the protesters had no interest in hearing the
lecture or in allowing the audience to hear it. Halbertal told me that
in all of his lectures on the subject of warfare, including at Columbia
University, this was the first time he had been subjected to a
disruptive demonstration.

As
someone with the keen observational skills of Mr. Magoo, it took me a
long time to notice a problem social-media acquaintances had been
talking about for months.

“I
woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different
donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my ex-babysitter
announcing her wedding and where I could send cash. No invitation to the
wedding. Just cash.”

“I’m
a believer in giving to real charities: medical research, school
drives, the Red Cross, et cetera,” said Heidi Knodle, owner of a picture
framing store in San Francisco. “I’m tired of people asking for a
vacation, funds for a wedding or their college tuition.”

The
crime writer Mark Ebner, whose mailboxes has been increasingly filled
with monetary requests, has a theory about it all. “I think online
begging has become the new economy.”

I thought my friends were exaggerating. After all, a visit to GoFundMe or YouCaring yields
site after site of worthy donation recipients. People whose homes were
wiped out by natural disasters. People with diseases I’d never heard of,
with no insurance and staggering medical expenses. Kids trying to pay
for their parents’ funerals. Parents with seriously ill children wanting
a trip to Disney World, and sick animals owned by people who couldn’t
afford the vet bills.

One man had set up a fund for a friend who needed to take a couple of months off while his wife died of brain cancer.

But
then, there were others. Many, many others. Education funds are great,
but do I really want to pay for a friend to travel to Peru to become a
shaman?

Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.

The
interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers pushed
into southern Ontario and cleared the animal’s habitat for farming and
killed a large number of the wolves that lived there.

That also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the white farmers brought dogs into the region.

Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors.

The
resulting offspring — which has been called the eastern coyote or, to
some, the “coywolf” — now number in the millions, according to
researchers at North Carolina State University.

Interspecies-bred animals are typically less vigorous than their parents, The Economist reported — if the offspring survive at all.

That’s not the case at all with the wolf-coyote-dog hybrid, which has developed into a sum greater than the whole of its parts.

At
about 55 pounds, the hybrid animal is about twice as heavy as a
standard coyote, and its large jaws, faster legs and muscular body allow
it to take down small deer and even hunt moose in packs, and the animal
is skilled at hunting in both open terrain and dense woodland.

From Grist:http://grist.org/food/what-i-learned-from-six-months-of-gmo-research-none-of-it-matters/By Nathanael Johnson9 Jan 2014About a third of the way through this series
on GMOs, after a particularly angry conflagration broke out on Twitter,
I asked my wife, Beth, if I could tell her what had happened. I was
hoping to exorcise those digital voices from my head. Someone had
probably accused me of crimes against humanity, shoddy journalism, and
stealing teddy bears from children — I forget the details, thank
goodness. But I remember Beth’s response.

“No offense,” she said, “but who cares?”

It’s
a little awkward to admit this, after devoting so much time to this
project, but I think Beth was right. The most astonishing thing about
the vicious public brawl over GMOs is that the stakes are so low.

I know that to those embroiled in the controversy this will seem preposterous. Let me try to explain.Let’s
start off with a thought experiment: Imagine two alternate futures, one
in which genetically modified food has been utterly banned, and another
in which all resistance to genetic engineering has ceased. In other
words, imagine what would happen if either side “won” the debate.In the GMO-free future, farming still looks pretty much the same. Without insect-resistant crops, farmers spray more broad-spectrum insecticides,
which do some collateral damage to surrounding food webs. Without
herbicide-resistant crops, farmers spray less glyphosate, which slows
the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds and perhaps leads to healthier
soil biota. Farmers also till their fields more often, which kills soil
biota, and releases a lot more greenhouse gases. The banning of GMOs
hasn’t led to a transformation of agriculture because GM seed was never a
linchpin supporting the conventional food system: Farmers could always do fine without it.
Eaters no longer worry about the small potential threat of GMO health
hazards, but they are subject to new risks: GMOs were neither the first,
nor have they been the last, agricultural innovation, and each of these
technologies comes with its own potential hazards. Plant scientists
will have increased their use of mutagenesis and epigenetic
manipulation, perhaps. We no longer have biotech patents, but we still
have traditional seed-breeding patents. Life goes on.

In the other
alternate future, where the pro-GMO side wins, we see less insecticide,
more herbicide, and less tillage. In this world, with regulations
lifted, a surge of small business and garage-biotechnologists got to
work on creative solutions for the problems of agriculture. Perhaps
these tinkerers would come up with some fresh ideas to usher out the era
of petroleum-dependent food. But the odds are low, I think, that any of
their inventions would prove transformative. Genetic engineering is
just one tool in the tinkerer’s belt. Newer tools are already available,
and scientists continue to makebreakthroughs
with traditional breeding. So in this future, a few more genetically
engineered plants and animals get their chance to compete. Some make the
world a little better, while others cause unexpected problems. But the
science has moved beyond basic genetic engineering, and most of the
risks and benefits of progress are coming from other technologies. Life
goes on.

The point is that even if you win, the payoff is
relatively small in the broad scheme of things. Really, why do so many
people care?

Our
addiction to consuming things is a vicious cycle, and buying a bigger
house to store it all isn’t the answer. Here’s how to get started on
downsizing

Madeleine SomervilleTuesday 20 October 2015The personal storage industry rakes in $22bn each year, and it’s only getting bigger. Why?I’ll
give you a hint: it’s not because vast nations of hoarders have finally
decided to get their acts together and clean out the hall closet.

And
finally, it’s not because of our growing families. This will no doubt
come as a great relief to our helpful commenters who each week kindly
suggest that for maximum environmental impact we simply stop procreating
altogether: family sizes in the western world are steadily shrinking,
from an average of 3.37 people in 1950 to just 2.6 today.

So, if
our houses have tripled in size while the number of people living in
them has shrunk, what, exactly, are we doing with all of this extra
space? And why the billions of dollars tossed to an industry that was
virtually nonexistent a generation or two ago?Well, friends, it’s because of our stuff. What kind of stuff? Who cares! Whatever fits! Furniture, clothing, children’s toys (for those not fans of deprivation,
that is), games, kitchen gadgets and darling tchotchkes that don’t do
anything but take up space and look pretty for a season or two before
being replaced by other, newer things – equally pretty and equally
useless.The simple truth is this: you can read all the books
and buy all the cute cubbies and baskets and chalkboard labels, even
master the life-changing magic of cleaning up – but if you have more
stuff than you do space to easily store it, your life will be spent a
slave to your possessions.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson